
Producer || Voluntaryist || Vocalist || Trendsetter // My books: https://xitter.cf/t.co/ilq0CVzCG6 // My comic books : https://xitter.cf/t.co/kXNqFUKHq6 🤵🖤💛👰♀@ThePholosopherX
Joined August 2020
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Rothbard had a lot of great takes.
Unfortunately, he suffered what many today also suffer in their analyses: a lack of privity to the topics discussed.
Eventually, if you keep trying to write on topics you don't do the deep dive on with robust, first-hand rigor, you fall prey to the trap of having your ideas being laundered from others.
This is the breaking point between deontological moral and economic reasoning and being a nuanced historian on a diverse set of topics.
It is also why I prefer to be conservative on topics I lack the experience on and prefer to look at those who are doing the ground work with direct evidence reporting via direct documentation.
Rothbard's polymath abilities still had limits - and the more he drifted into what he was not actually an expert on by direct experience, the more his takes became a muddled mix of historical revisionism built on incomplete narratives (often, ideologically driven rather than empirically driven on empirical topics).
Replying to @LudwigNverMises
Rothbard blamed Britain for getting us into WWI & WWII, then blamed Israel for getting us into wars in the Middle East after the Israeli War of Independence. He literally said that in every war of the 20th century America and Britain were in the wrong, or more wrong, than any of our enemies. He blamed Israel for the Six Day War. And, of course, he blamed us for the Cold War, too.
Rothbard blamed us (America & Britain) for WWI, WWII, the Cold War, the Korean War, Vietnam War, the Falklands War, the IRA's campaign against the UK, etc.
Of course, Germany started WWI, WWII (with Japan), Stalin started the Cold War, the Communists (North Korea, Soviets, & Red China) started the Korean War & the Vietnam War (North Vietnam instead of North Korea), Argentina started the Falklands War, the IRA (with Soviet backing) started the Troubles, etc. He blamed Britain for Germany's invasion of Poland, and even blamed Finland for its invasion by the Soviets.
Rothbard made DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) his only method of foreign policy analysis. He had a perfect record of claiming the exact opposite of the truth in these matters. There isn't a totalitarian regime whose propaganda he wasn't willing to parrot approvingly on this, whether it be Hitler's, Stalin's, Kim Il-Sung's, Ho Chi Minh's, Nasser's, the Junta's, etc.
I've never seen any Rothbardian make the argument you cite about American economic might making us secure enough to withdraw from the rest of the world. Instead, his followers adhere with absolute loyalty to his demented foreign policy positions.
Jack V Lloyd retweeted
It's a very telling statement when leftists threaten peaceful gun owners with state violence. The good news is that rebellion against tyranny is not limited to those outside the state. And the PEOPLE are the ones with the most arms.
Jack V Lloyd retweeted
You can never compromise on your liberties or else they are chipped away bit-by-bit until you have nothing left.
Communism is the elimination of money, private property, hierarchy, wages, and rent.
Which is why every move toward communism is a destruction of the necessary mechanisms for prosperity.
Elon Musk is correct.
Government is just the largest corporation with a unique *legal* monopoly on violence.
Government grants itself power to do things that, if we did so privately, we would be in jail for.
Which is why taxation is theft.
Replying to @Rothmus
Those who are opposed to corporations and favor government do not realize that government is simply the largest, most monopolistic corporation of all and it has a monopoly on violence.
Socialism always leads to poverty and despair.
It's the crushing tide of state boots against the productive.
Top 5 Socialist sociopaths:
Socialism destroys wealth systematically, and the leaders who implement it deserve to be judged not merely by their body counts but by the full scope of their economic vandalism and the machinery they build to sustain it.
1. Mao Zedong earns the top position without argument. His Great Leap Forward collectivized 500 million farmers, abolished private farming by 1958, and replaced price signals with production quotas set by party cadres who had never grown a crop. Steel output targets sent peasants melting their own tools in backyard furnaces while grain rotted unharvested. The economy contracted by 30 percent between 1959 and 1961. Mao knew the numbers and continued the policy anyway.
2. Fidel Castro ran Cuba for 49 years and handed his brother a country that still rations cooking oil. Before 1959, Cuba had a higher per capita income than much of Southern Europe. Castro nationalized 166 American businesses in 1960, then dismantled the domestic private sector entirely by 1968 during his "Revolutionary Offensive." Sugar, the one export Cuba could sell, averaged production below 1950 levels through the 1990s. Central planners cannot replicate what price signals do for free.
3. Hugo Chavez inherited a functional oil-exporting economy in Venezuela in 1999 and used oil revenue to paper over nationalization after nationalization, seizing more than 1,200 companies between 2002 and 2012. When oil prices fell after 2014, Venezuelan grocery store shelves were empty because Chavez and then Maduro had already killed domestic food production with price controls and land seizures. The people started eating zoo animals. Inflation hit 1,000,000 percent by 2018. Three million Venezuelans fled by 2019.
4. Nicolae Ceaușescu ran Romania with a particular brand of cruelty that deserves more attention than it gets. He repaid foreign debt by exporting virtually all Romanian food production through the 1980s, leaving Romanians with 1,500 calories per day while the Securitate secret police maintained one informant for every 43 citizens. The Danube-Black Sea Canal, built on political prisoner labor and costing billions, moved almost no commercially significant cargo.
4. Kim Il-sung built the definitive socialist laboratory in North Korea after 1948, and the results are legible from space. The Korean peninsula is one country split by an ideology, and the satellite image of darkness above the 38th parallel is the most damning economic graphic socialism has ever produced. Agricultural collectivization through the 1950s and 1960s created famine conditions that recur because the system has no mechanism to respond to scarcity except political denial.
Each of these leaders shared one commitment: they all destroyed the price system. Prices tell you what people actually value, and that information was politically inconvenient.
Jack V Lloyd retweeted
The PEOPLE have the right to keep and bear arms. The militia is just feature, not a mandate.
Happy Birthday to Javier Milei, who single-handedly brought anarcho-capitalism to a global political spotlight and shifted the destiny for millions of people toward a free market future.
A true hero for liberty!









